Yoshiko Hariu is the co-founder of Spark Studios, which specialises in cooking classes for children
My business partner Virginia Ngai and I founded Spark Studios this year. The idea was to give children a convenient, private place to unleash their creativity and improve their English while learning how to cook. We want to teach children a skill that will be useful to them later in life.
I never received any professional culinary training. I learned to cook from my mother and grandmother. Food is their passion, and that has been passed on to me.
The biggest challenge in teaching kids cooking is to get them to focus, listen and be patient.
To achieve this, we limit our class size to between four and eight students. I usually start off baking banana bread, blueberry muffins or oatmeal raisin cookies.
Once they are more confident, we move on to preparing carbonara pasta. Cooking is a good way to teach children time management.